Cloud Translation Overview

Cloud Translation enables your websites and applications to programmatically translate text with state-of-the-art translation models.

Cloud Translation offers the following surfaces for translation:

You can access the Google Translation AI product through several surfaces, each offering different levels of control and functionality:

  • Cloud Translation - Basic API: This provides quick, plug-and-play access to the standard Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model.

  • Cloud Translation - Advanced API with NMT: This provides access to the standard Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model and supports common features like glossary, document, batch, and real-time translation.

  • Cloud Translation - Advanced API with TLLM: This offers an advanced Translation LLM model, intended for users who need a more specialized service. It features Adaptive Translation that can achieve customization and localization with a limited number of example translation pairs, and also supports multi-sentence context windows.

  • Vertex AI Model Garden Platform: This platform allows users to access and customize models directly. It's for those who want to build their own end-to-end translation MLOps pipeline. Users can work with foundation models for translation-adjacent tasks and customize them through Vertex-fine tuning and embeddings. This surface offers two options:

    • a Neural Machine Translation (NMT) - Custom Model
    • a Translation LLM (TLLM) - Supervised Fine Tuning model.

  • Vertex AI Studio (UI experience): This surface provides a user-friendly interface for rapid prototyping, quick experimentation, and fine-tuning. Users can choose between the NMT and Translation LLM (TLLM) models, and use the UI to upload example translation pairs for Adaptive Translation or to fine-tune and customize their models.

The documentation on this site covers the Cloud Translation API.

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The Cloud Translation API comes in two editions:

  • Cloud Translation - Basic - Use the Google pre-trained Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model for the fastest translations. Cloud Translation - Basic is optimized for simplicity and scale and is a good fit for applications that handle primarily casual user-generated content, such as chat, social media, or comments.
  • Cloud Translation - Advanced - In addition to the NMT, this edition gives you access to the Translation LLM which is fine-tuned from Gemini foundation models. This model offers higher quality, more natural sounding translations and performs especially well translating idioms and sayings compared to other models. Cloud Translation - Advanced is optimized for customization and long form content use cases. Customization features include glossaries and custom model selection.

The right edition for you depends on which version of the client libraries or service endpoint that you use.

If you are planning a new project, build your application with Cloud Translation - Advanced to take advantage of new features and service improvements. Cloud Translation - Basic remains available, but does not support new features like using glossaries, requesting batch translations, or using AutoML models.

Refer to the edition comparison for more details.

Benefits

Cloud Translation can translate text for more than 100 language pairs. If you don't know the language of your source text, Cloud Translation can detect it for you. For a list of all of the supported languages, see Supported languages.

Cloud Translation scales seamlessly and allows unlimited character translations per day. However, there are restrictions on content size for each request and request rates. Additionally, you can use quota limits to manage your budget. For more information, see Quotas and limits.

Example use case

As an enterprise organization, you can include translated text in existing internal workflows. For example, you might have a global support team that receives customer cases in many different languages. You can add Cloud Translation into your workflow to translate those customer cases into the native language of your support team members.

By using Cloud Translation, you improve the overall efficiency of your support team because they don't need to manually translate text themselves or rely on others.

Supported features

The following table shows which features are available in each edition.

Feature Basic Advanced
Translate with the NMT model
Translate with the Translation LLM
Translate with Adaptive Translation models
Translate with custom models
Translate multiple strings in a single request
Batch translations with Cloud Storage
Translate documents
Glossary support (control terminology)
Train custom models
Language Detection
Integrated REST API
Integrated gRPC API
Service Account
API Key
Audit logging
Supports HTML
Supports 100+ Languages
Romanization support
Transliteration support
Adaptive Translation
Multi-regional endpoint support
VPC Service Controls support

Refer to Cloud Translation - Advanced features for more details on Cloud Translation - Advanced.

Pricing

Cloud Translation charges you on a monthly basis based on the number of characters that you send. For more information, see Pricing.

Resources and further reading